[Question] Overly Reflective Terrain Textures?

Unity Engine
1

Hello Guys,

I am having trouble with the textures on the terrain (Unity5.5.1) looking overly bright and extremely reflective and don’t know how to stop this. The textures are so reflective that I can clearly see the outlines on the skybox above the terrain. And they look overly metallic/plastic as well, and well make everything look wet, they are basically horrible to look at - it’s not just the grass, but the sand, rocks and asphalt. Whereas the the textures on objects look fine!?!

However, I choose these textures because they came up looking so good on a racing game that I am working on as well and they came up a treat on that. They are the exact same textures and normals used in that game. The settings for the lighting almost the same as the racing game - I’ve tried a number of different textures and they all end up looking the same - like the ones that come in the environment assets as well as a couple I found on the Net and the textures I mentioned in the racing game.

As always any help would be greatly appreciated!

Warmest Regards.

2

The terrain shader samples the painted texture’s smoothness from the alpha channel. You might have missed it in this window:


The alpha channels of the textures you’re using are most likely entirely white, making it fully smooth and thus reflective.

You could open them up in Photoshop/Gimp and adjust the alpha channel.

1 Like
3

Thankyou for your reply.

Being a complete noob on texturing, I have no idea on “adjusting the alpha channel” or what I am supposed to do! I have Gimp, apparently a requirement for doing anything to do with Unity, but I don’t see what it is that I am supposed to do with the image to adjust the alpha channel. I opened Gimp and added an alpha layer to the image, but, then I couldn’t figure out how to change it? I shut the layers above it down and it just went black. I’m sure it’s very simple but I need an idea of what I am supposed to adjust so I can Google it?

Thankyou and regards.

4

I’ve never used Gimp before. But in photoshop you would add an alpha layer, and fill it with a white color (fully rough) using the bucket tool. Then save it out as a PSD or TGA file. since PNG files won’t save the alpha channel.

Alternatively, you could use a legacy shader on the terrain in the terrain options, if that looks alright.

5

Aha! Saving it as a PSD or TGA file is the information I was missing. I’ll try Googling how I change the alpha layer to a solid colour as the bucket tool didn’t seem to work. I try to avoid using Gimp and Blender whenever possible, but, they are the only real alternatives to those REEEAAAALLLLYYYY expensive subscriptions.

Thanks for the Legacy tip - I did start using that and everything improved everything drastically!!! It was soooo much better. It’s just that I don’t like using anything legacy because legacy to me means it could be taken out at any time and I should learn to use the “default” options even if it means more work! To my way of thinking it shouldn’t, but, I suppose the folks at Unity know what they are doing :(. I’m sure Unreal and CryEngine and the others all make us do the same thing when it comes to covering up the terrain.